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Teachers

Reaching Out to Our Schools

Youth Services offers a number of services and resources for teachers at schools that serve residents of Tinley Park or Orland Hills. We are dedicated to reaching out to our community schools, providing services for teachers to enhance the classroom experience and to promote an ongoing relationship between area schools and the public library. Check to see if your school is within our service area. You can contact any of our school liasons about the programs and services we have to offer to schools at schoolcontact@tplibrary.org.

Special Education

Teachers who work with students with special needs may also benefit from our Special Services page, which highlights a number of resources available through the library to support your work in the classroom.

Battle of the Books

Our librarians visit various schools with Tinley Park or Orland Hills students in attendance every spring for the Battle of the Books competition. The contest revolves around the current year's Illinois School Media Award books and is offered to Grades 3–5 (who will read and be quizzed on books nominated for the Bluestem Award) and Grades 6–8 (who will read and be quizzed on books nominated for the Caudill Award). The school hosts the competition and organizes the competing teams, while the library sends two representatives to the school to run the actual battle. We prepare and bring questions for these battles only. Battles should be scheduled well in advance. If you are interested, please contact the school liasons at schoolcontact@tplibrary.org or call the Youth Services Department at 708.532.0160 x 2.

Teacher Resources

The Youth Services Department has curated a list of online resources for Common Core to support your unit and lesson planning.

The library subscribes to a number of databases (found under the "Homework" & "Education" categories of our main resources page) that may be utilized in the classroom, including Explora Educator's Edition, Worldbook Online, TumbleBooks, and PebbleGo.

Along with the Find a Book feature found on the Lexile website, the company also features a list of Apps that can be used to scan barcodes of certain books to check their Lexile number. Some of the apps can also be used to catalog and monitor checkouts of books in your own classroom.